Two subsidiaries of Berkshire Hathaway Energy, an $84 billion international portfolio of energy businesses, and Uptake Technologies, a Chicago-based predictive analytics SaaS platform company that delivers solutions to increase productivity, reliability, and safety, announced a long-term contract for Uptake Wind. Uptake Wind’s solutions are commercially available and let wind power owners increase availability, maximize online performance, and optimize maintenance and site operations for wind fleets located around the world.
Uptake Wind’s solutions are commercially available and let wind power owners increase availability, maximize online performance, and optimize maintenance and site operations for wind fleets located around the world.
The announcement follows nearly a year of joint research, design, and development of a predictive portfolio management solution for wind power owners. Uptake is deploying the software throughout BHE’s MidAmerican Energy Company and BHE Renewables wind fleets, which together account for approximately 5 GW of capacity. Uptake Wind expects to offer the solution to other wind owners this fall and is developing additional analytics applications across renewables and the broader sector.
“After exploring a number of data analytic solutions to optimize productivity, particularly through actionable insight into operations and maintenance of our wind fleet, we identified Uptake as an ideal partner,” said Bill Fehrman, President & CEO of both MidAmerican Energy Company and BHE Renewables. “We wanted software that was more than a dashboard. We want to put data-driven recommendations into the hands of our operational team members, so they can drive business value directly. Given the quality and breadth of Uptake’s platform, the cross-industry data science acumen, and Uptake’s experience developing and commercializing similar tools with other industrial leaders, we saw them as the ideal partner to help us push our wind fleet toward greater efficiency and productivity.”
Uptake Wind enables owners to maximize performance while reducing operations and maintenance costs. It allows engineering and operations teams to quickly discover, investigate and track high-priority problems impacting downtime across a diverse fleet; detect, analyze, and resolve underperformance issues; and respond to machine learning recommendations to optimize production.
“The MidAmerican Energy and BHE Renewables teams have deep insights into wind power owners’ business problems and user needs,” said Brad Keywell, CEO and cofounder of Uptake. “Their expertise let Uptake create solutions that deliver answers to the right people at the right time, so they can prioritize the highest-value actions.”
Uptake’s platform makes applications possible across sectors including energy, construction, mining, rail, aviation, and retail. The platform incorporates sensor-generated data, massive enterprise system inputs, and external data assets. Leveraging data integrity and applying advanced machine learning and next-generation security, Uptake applications such as predictive diagnostics and fleet optimization generate significant cost savings and improve productivity, reliability, and safety.
“Uptake Wind is the first commercially available product of the broader Energy application ecosystem,” said Sonny Garg, Global Lead of Uptake Energy, and the former Chief Information and Innovation Officer at Exelon Corporation. “Together with our industry-leading partners, we are executing on the opportunity to shape and accelerate the reality of a world in which everyone can access dynamic, resilient, and sustainable power.”
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